Developing a Continuous Non-invasive Intracranial Pressure Monitoring Device

The human skull forms a rigid box. The pressure inside this box is normally fairly low. In many brain disorders this pressure can increase leading to headaches and, in more severe cases, confusion coma or death. Examples of disorders which cause raised pressure inside the head include head injury, a brain haemorrhage, or a build up of fluid on the brain (hydrocephalus) as well as many others. It is therefore essential to be able to recognise increased pressure inside the head in order to provide early effective treatment. Currently the only effective way to measure pressure is to perform an operation to drill a hole through the skull and to insert a probe or a tube into the brain. Aside from the obvious discomfort of the procedure it carries significant risks such as infection or bleeding in the brain and it is therefore only performed in the most severe cases. We have been working to develop a way to measure the pressure inside the head without the need to open the skull and insert something into the brain. Any specialist in Neurosugery, Emergency Medicine or even General Practice will tell you that this would be an extremely useful device. That is because it will save those currently needing an operation, to measure the pressure, the discomfort and risks of this. Perhaps, even more importantly, it will provide a way, in people with much less severe symptoms, of differentiating between a common headache that is likely to pass or something more serious that requires treatment. Our aim is to make it possible to measure the pressure inside the head just as easily as we can measure blood pressure. We have already developed a prototype method. Now we are making it easier to use and testing exactly how well it works.